Sassuolo

The name may come from petroleum. Black oil had always surfaced in the area, and at the time it was called «olio di sasso», stone oil — it was extracted at Montegibbio and used as a medicine from Roman times to the nineteenth century — and from that, historians say, Sassuolo. The other hypothesis is more prosaic: the Latin saxum solum, «stony ground». Either way it is geology speaking, and it is geology again that made the town's modern fortune: the badlands of scaly clay around it gave the raw material to the ceramic district, where eighty per cent of Italian tiles are made and from which three quarters of the output goes abroad.

But the town also has a courtly heart. The Palazzo Ducale, the Este summer «delizia», was built in 1634 by Bartolomeo Avanzini on the Pio castle: inside, the frescoes of Jean Boulanger and the Gallery of Bacchus; at the entrance, three statues carved by Antonio Raggi to designs by Gian Lorenzo Bernini; in the park the fishpond the locals call the Fontanazzo, a basin ringed with false ruins, like a sunken city. Facing San Giorgio stands instead the Guglia that in 1591 Marco Pio di Savoia had raised with his own name cut into it, as an answer to the Ghirlandina of Modena and to Este supremacy: a few years later he was murdered, and Sassuolo went back to the Este. The Secchia runs on towards the lambrusco hills.